How do the members of such a rootless, mobile, indifferent society acquire a sense of who they are? Most of them don’t. The Great Gatsby presents large numbers of them as comic, disembodied names of guests at dinner parties: the Chromes, the Backhyssons, and the Dennickers. Some, of course, have some measure of fame, but even Jordan Baker’s reputation does not do much for her other than get her entre to more parties. A very few, such as Gatsby, stand out by their wealth; his hospitality secures him a hold on many peoples’ memories, but Fitzgerald is quick to point up the emptiness of this, […]
In this connection, Fitzgerald’s insistence on Gatsby as a man who “sprang from his own Platonic conception of himself” is important. Conceiving one’s self would seem to be a final expression of rootlessness. And it has other consequences for love, money, and aspirations as well. When one’s sense of self is selfcreated, when one is present at one’s own creation, so to speak, one is in a paradoxical position. One knows everything about oneself that can be known, and yet the significance of such knowledge is unclear, for no outside contexts exist to create meaning.
The result is that a self-created man turns to the past, for he can know that. It is an inescapable context. For Gatsby and for the novel, the past is crucial. His sense of the past as something that he not only knows but also thinks he can control sets Gatsby apart from Nick and gives him mythical, larger-than-life dimensions. When he tells Nick that “‘of course”‘ the past can be repeated or that Tom’s love for Daisy was “‘just personal”‘, he may be compensating for his inability to recapture Daisy; but he must believe these things because the post-war world in which he, Gatsby, lives is meaningless and almost wholly loveless.
A glance at the relationships in The Great Gatsby proves this latter point. Daisy and Tom’s marriage has gone dead; they must cover their dissatisfactions with the distractions of the idle rich. Myrtle and Tom are using one another; Myrtle hates George, who is too dull to understand her; the McKees exist in frivolous and empty triviality. Even Nick seems unsure about his feelings for the tennis girl back in the Midwest. [… ]
In brief, the world of The Great Gatsby can seem as sordid, loveless, commercial, and dead as the ash heaps presided over by the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. Indeed, this atmosphere is so essential to The Great Gatsby that one of the alternative titles Fitzgerald considered for the novel was Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires. Against this backdrop, the Gatsby-Daisy relationship seems to shine. It is at least a shared connection in which both partners respond with vital intensity. For Gatsby it has endured: He has loved Daisy for five years.
And if their love is founded on feelings from the past, these give it, notwithstanding Gatsby’s insistence on being able to repeat the past, an inviolability. It exists in the world of money and corruption but is not of it. Some implications of the inviolability Gatsby does not see. His very protesting, however, shows his sense of the impossibility of returning and makes at once more poignant and more desperate his effort to win Daisy a poignancy further increased by the futility of his money in achieving this end.
I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see. ” He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was…. [… ]
